Tentacle-Free Anime: "Wolf Children" (2012) Review

Family is something that I can often take for granted. It’s not a good thing, but it’s something I’m working on. When you’re more or less the only one around who doesn’t share the same interests as everyone else, it can be easy to distance yourself from everyone; almost a little too easy. But family is still very important to me, and I hope that when I become a parent my kids understand the choices I give them, and I will do my best to respect the choices they make in life. For better or worse, as my parents did for me.

Summary:Hana is a 19-year-old student who falls in a "fairy-tale like" love with a "wolf man". Over the course of the 13-year story Hana gives birth to two children—older sister Yuki, and younger brother Ame, or "Snow and Rain". At first the family quietly lives in the city trying to hide their wolf heritage, but when the "wolf man" suddenly dies Hana makes the decision to move to a rural town, far from their previous city life.[AnimeNewsNetwork.com]

Don’t let the words “fairy-tale like” in the synopsis above push you away just yet, hear me out. This movie is far from a fairy tale, yet at the same time it tells of the truest kind of fairy tale that I’ve seen in a long time. Wolf Children is first and foremost about family, told from the fresh p.o.v. of a young, newly blossoming woman who falls in love with a half wolf/half man and is then later forced to take care of their two children all by herself. It’s a perspective I’ve rarely seen take center stage in a show of any kind, really.

DVD cover

Hana is the mom’s mom, the woman who works her tail off (yes, there’s a pun here) so that her two children can grow up and make the choices that befit a kind such as theirs: do they want to grow up to be human, or wolf? Either way, if she pulls this off, whichever choice they make she will be proud of them.

If you say that takes away any drama, knowing she loves them so much that it doesn’t matter how they turn out, then you’d be
wrong. As during these 13 years, skip a few years here and there, Hana has to
try extremely hard to make sure these kids don’t get found out as to their true
nature, and she keeps them secluded from the outside world, so what happens
when they grow older and crave human contact? And when their ultimate decisions
do come, will she really be able to live with herself? These are very important
questions that get tested in very powerful ways.

One thing that struck a chord with me was how real these characters felt. Hana may have been a little too Mary Sue throughout the first half of the movie, but she was caring and gentle to her kids, but also knew how to scold them when either of them (namely Yuki) did anything wrong. Her ultimate unwillingness at first to let her kids go free really showed how this trooper mom we’ve watched all this way could break down so easily at the thought of losing either of them because they grew up, just like a mom does when any kid has to finally fly the nest. It makes her more relatable and flawed, and I say that because if she’d been seen as too strong throughout the entirety of the movie I would’ve called foul.

Hana with her kids Ame and Yuki

Ame and Yuki too feel like what kids growing up should. They play and get in trouble; they have two very different personalities that ultimately intertwine and tie the noose around their fates near the climax (don’t worry, not a spoil, just some symbolism), and they cherish the small things in life. They don’t need ipads, iphones or any of the latest technology. They get to experience nature and see its wonders for theirselves. The movie represents being different, growing up, and how hiding it can ultimately destroy you until you finally embrace who you are inside, whether those who know you would approve or not. It’s about family, and choosing your destiny. It’s also about letting go, and how hard such decisions can be made when you’ve set the goal in sight and think you’re prepared for when it finally comes. Mamoru Hosoda is one of my personal favorite anime directors, right up there alongside Satoshi Kon, he puts a lot of his own personal past and feelings into his works and they always show. And from what I’ve seen of his work, I don’t think any of his other work show case his truest passions in life like Wolf Children.

The father...

But, while I’ve been speaking its praises, there is the unfortunate fact that the movie does have its flaws. The movie, while covering a lot of groundwork in 2 hours, does move rather slowly a lot of the time. And while the passing of time is very important in any medium wanting to show off such elements, here it almost feels like you’ve been sitting for 4 hours when it’s only been about 2 by the time the movie is over. I don’t really see this as a good thing, because that means some scenes get more screen time than they should when others could be given a bit more time to breathe.

Yuki and Ame as wolf cubs.

Add to that, while I love the animation Hosoda generally puts in his films, one thing that has bugged me and it’s shown off the most here, is that the further the movie pans out the more unclear the faces on characters become. Opting to give the scenery in the scene more detail and prominence instead, and sometimes they don’t even have faces which can take me out of the story. I also think Ame’s story gets the biggest boot of the movie which focuses much more heavily on the women with Hana and Yuke. While that’s good and all, Ame has many off screen adventures as a wolf that we never get to see and I feel would have given us a better taste for what being that kind of creature is like, and probably help us relate better to Ame and Yuki’s choices in the end, as we would’ve been given an equal look at what it was like for these kids to grow up as human and as wolf. Still, Wolf Children is a wonderful film and I highly recommend it. It’s a very good example of the many different fields any anime can choose to take on, and why anime has so much variety to offer in the sense of stories that can be told through it.Final Score: 4.5 Secretly Loveable Grandpas out of 5Have you seen "Wolf Children"? How did you enjoy the movie and the review?